A Platform for Output Dialogic Strategies in Natural Multimodal Dialogue Systems

The development of natural multimodal dialogue systems remains a very difficult task. The flexibility and naturalness they offer result in an increased complexity that current software tools do not address appropriately. One challenging issue we address here is the generation of cooperative responses in an appropriate multimodal form, highlighting the intertwined relation of content and presentation. We identify a key component, the dialogic strategy component, as a mediator between the natural dialogue management and the multimodal presentation. This component selects the semantic information content to be presented according to various presentation constraints. Constraints include inherent characteristics of modalities, the availability of a modality as well as preferences of the user. Thus the cooperative behaviour of the system could be adapted as could its multimodal behaviour. In this paper, we present the dialogic strategy component and an associated platform to quickly develop output multimodal cooperative responses in order to explore different dialogic strategies. ACM Classification: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces- prototyping, user-centered design